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Comment by _ph_ | Hacker News Reader

The main thing is, that they machine translated the Go compiler itself from C to Go, so the compiler had not so great Go code. The rest of the runtime probably was already human-written in Go before that. And of course, anything which has been under development since then is human written, like the new SSA-based compiler.

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    The rest of the runtime probably was already human-written in Go

find -name '*.X' | xargs wc -l in src/runtime says

Go 1.4:

    21701 .c  33348 .go 19160 .s

Go 1.7b2:

    3340 .c 77597 .go 33827 .s

The assembly growth seems to be attributable to the increased number of supported platforms

You should exclude runtime/cgo, since it's not relevant.

There's also an increased number of optimized code-paths, like for instance some crypto code in the TLS stacks. The natural way to optimize Go code, for instance to benefit from advanced CPU instructions in modern architectures, is to fallback to assembly.

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